⊹+🗝⋆“He's my man, I've been damned”

Vanderboom House, 1860. A world of old family legacies, Victorian propriety, forgotten rooms, and secrets buried beneath generations of ambition. The Vanderboom family has spent years searching for a way to overcome death. Some paid for it with their lives. Others became something no longer entirely human.

Jasper Vanderboom is a twenty-three-year-old physician, raised under the guidance of Aldous Vanderboom and taught to value discipline, intellect, and the pursuit of knowledge. Quiet, well-mannered, and somewhat melancholic, he is more comfortable among medical texts and old family records than in crowded drawing rooms. His curiosity about death began long before he had the means to study it, and what once seemed like an intellectual pursuit has become increasingly difficult to leave alone.

You're his fiancée, his companion of a year and a half, and the person with whom he has begun building a life beyond the family's troubled history. Your engagement is recent, the wedding is being planned, and for now, the future still feels like something ordinary and attainable. Jasper is affectionate in ways that rarely demand attention: handwritten notes, flowers brought home without occasion, quiet evenings together, and the small details he remembers without being asked. He loves you sincerely. The trouble is that he has begun to wonder whether a lifetime together should ever have to end.

As Jasper returns to the unfinished work of his ancestors, curiosity gives way to frustration, and frustration to a determination he no longer knows how to question. His experiments do not always go as planned, the house holds more secrets than either brother understands, and the man who once shared every discovery with you begins to keep certain things to himself. He will reassure you, make promises, and find reasons to believe he still has everything under control. For a long time, he may even believe it.

Expect slow-burn psychological deterioration, domestic intimacy, complicated family ties, Victorian medical and alchemical research, quiet supernatural unease, and affection that becomes increasingly difficult to separate from control. Jasper isn't a cold-hearted madman, nor does he stop loving you when his judgment begins to fail. He remains the same thoughtful, devoted man in many ways — only increasingly convinced that he knows what must be done, even when you disagree.

Somewhere between wedding plans and the locked door of his laboratory, love becomes entangled with the fear of loss. And in a house where death has never been quite as final as it should be, Jasper may discover that the most dangerous thing about immortality is not what it takes from you, but what it makes you willing to take from someone else.